Really ripe white ones.

Not a tongue twister although if the grapes that we've picked today do what they should, after a few glasses of vino it could be difficult to say!

The vine that produces our black grapes has loads of grapes,  it's heavily laden,  huge bunches with tiny tightly packed grapes but not yet black which is unusual.  They are changing colour and our neighbour - yes,  a Paco, - he has picked his black grapes, but there are loads of different types, different amounts of sun,  soil and water probably play a part too,  so we will wait a while for those.

Today was the first of the white grapes,  we have 12 brewing buckets, so first we filled those, took them up to our grape crusher and picked the grapes off the bunches.  That may not be essential but all those stalks take up room,  make it harder to burst the grapes as they go through the 'mangle',  did 2 buckets at a time,  mangled each batch twice.  Again, that may not be necessary but it seems that the first mangle bursts most of them and the second makes sure they are all burst and produces a lot of juice.  Those 12 buckets then only filled 6 once burst, although to the brim,  so back out with 6 empty ones,  same procedure as before,  but as the buckets were really full and they need room to ferment,  we evened out the amounts and now have all 12 starting to ferment down in the kitchen.

I took the bathroom scales outside to try and get some idea of weight picked - about 195 pounds which is about 88 kilos.  Hopefully slightly over 50% in juice so we are looking at potentially 40 to 50 litres of white wine.  Still to come,  the same again in white grapes followed by what we call the blush ones,  same size big fat grapes as today's, but a dark rosy colour.  Then all being well the big bunches with tiny grapes will have ripened enough to give us a red wine.

The strange thing about all these grapes is that - firstly we usually have started a week ago, and  secondly we normally have to be very wary of wasps - especially me cos I am allergic to them and swell up alarmingly if stung,  but today there were only a couple of wasps around the vines while we picked and only 2 that fell out of a bunch that John was picking.

For the next few days we'll just need to stir each brewing bucket every morning then Friday or Saturday we'll put them through the press -  the wine into 10 or 20 litre containers and the pulp to the compost.

And  then we start all over again....

And again....

But the sun is shining and the end result will be wonderful wine for the coming year.